Pomp

Don’t ask me how it works, I’m just a photographer. I only found out about this gig on Monster. You plug in a resume listing a double major in Photography and American History and you’re not going to get too many worthwhile hits. Just unrelated insurance garbage mostly. So when a high-paying salaried position with Kronos Industries comes up, yeah, you bite.

So no, I don’t know the secrets of time travel. I don’t know how they get the pod from point B to point A. How I don’t end up in the vacuum of space due to the constantly changing position of the Earth as it revolves around the sun at thirty kilometers a second. I don’t know anything about how the Earth I come back to isn’t exactly the same as the Earth I’ve left. I don’t know how they power it, how much the operating costs, where Kronos gets all its funding. I’m just a photographer. All I know is point and click.

Okay, so maybe I’ve been briefed on a little bit. I know a little about the safety procedures should the pod get stuck somehow in the past. I know about how far back the pods are capably of going, somewhere in the neighborhood of nine-hundred years though they keep revising that figure upward. I certainly know all the protocols and procedures for minimizing the impact of the present on the past. They run you through that shit for six months before you set foot in a pod. It’s practically a boot camp. And then every six months after that they require a quiz on specifics to make sure you’ve retained all that knowledge. That’s not to mention the periodic rules revision sessions they schedule whenever somebody up high decides to clamp down on some detail or another. Most of this is public knowledge, right? It’s all discussed in those teledocs, or written about in Ira Tang’s supposed tell-all indictment of Kronos and its nefarious meddling with history.

This isn’t one of those, of course. Absurd really, given the thoroughness that these minimization protocols are drilled into our heads. For the most part Kronos has treated me very, very well. A cushy salary far above anything I might have expected when I graduated from college. Nice benefits. Unbeatable hours. Here’s a company that actually requires three week breaks between jobs, only requiring that you work through a small stack of books in your down time. So you end up spending somewhere between a couple of hours and two days back in the past, and you get the next three weeks to relax and bone up on the current historical consensus about your next assignment. Not too bad.

And the work itself? Please, you hardly need a photography major for it. You’re creating a historical photographic record of pre-daguerreotype civilization. None of your shots are ever going to be put in a gallery or a show. Remember, you’re not even using your fancy SLR here, just a standard issue digital point and click with a mediocre zoom. No tripods, no zoom lenses, nothing that could possibly be construed as a weapon by a culture not yet exposed to such technologies. You do the best you can, but nobody is expecting Ansel Adams here.